I heard the name as a kid and I always knew it was my name internally. As a kid, I always daydreamt of a pretty girl in an overcast field with the wind blowing against her hair. I decided her name was Leyla. It wasn't until I came out that I understood that the girl was me, and had always been me.

I had a character in a story I wrote but never published that I've gone back to several times, originally named Sol for some in-universe reasons but I eventually changed it for other reasons. (Sorry for being vague, it wasn't a great story.) I still liked the name Sol, though, and eventually decided that I wanted to adopt it. I ended up going with Soleil (pronounced So-lay) because I like how it sounds.

Just thought about different names and the one I later chose somehow just felt good

I used to play a ton of online RPGs with a strong focus on actually roleplaying and I pretended I was a girl named Alia. So I'm kind of surprised I never considered that name when I actually came out. In my 20s I started hanging out with an older transwoman who was kind of like my mentor, and she named me Shauna. I ended up back in the closet for about 15 years, but when my egg cracked again a couple of years ago I floated a few options to my partner which the same first initial as my deadname, and she didn't like any of them except Shauna, and to be honest I also liked Shauna the best.

Ever since I was a kid, I've loved the video game series Thief, where curse words are often replaced with the word taffer. I chose it as my username, but then it stuck as my actual name when I later came out. Most people just assume I'm related to the guy from Bar Rescue and not that I'm a big fan of a stealth game from the 90s

I had a little Lalafell boy in FFXIV named Cocozan Cozan.

When I switched to femroe I changed the last name, truncated the first to Coco.

People knew me as Coco and she/her online and it felt right. Decided to keep the name for myself.

Not trans but more genderfluid I guess. I have this alter ego and I got her name by finding the closest conventional name to my online nickname. And the full name version is hella cute which helps me to feel more fem. Anna and Annabelle.

I really wanted a name that starts with the letter 'M' because it just felt right. I then looked up "nonbinary/genderneutral names that start with the letter M" I found one with a slight association with my deadname

I looked for astronomy-related names, and ended up choosing the name of an asteroid ((2) Pallas)

I wanted my first name to be something easy for my family to adjust to, and chose my middle name because it spoke to me. Now I've learned my middle name is a family name, and my family and all my friends call me by my middle name, so my first name is relegated to official business only. It is a convenient way to identify scams very quickly :)

They're all derivative names. My first/middle names are gender-neutral, though I use the original spelling (which implies masc).

I won't go into detail since it's generally not a good idea to share full names on the internet with strangers, but when I was a kid I looked up my birthname, and the meaning of my first name was "the (opposing) version of [Name]" (eg "Francine is the feminine of Frank").

The irony of the original name was that its meaning was 'very gender' (eg: if Frank were to mean "buff and hairy"), so it was confusing if the opposing version's meaning changed in any way. I took a shine to it when I was a kid, then I used the original name and its most common spelling as my new first name as an adult.

My name (Diamond) mostly came from my username. I used to be more active talking on Discord, so a lot of my friends would call me based on my username. It was weird at first, but I got used to it! Some people found it surprising, but the reactions aren't too bad.

I mostly just had some rules for names I wanted to avoid: names of people I knew personally, names that sound weird/unusual in english or swedish (where I'm from).

I considered a bunch of names via the usual methods like baby name lists and random name generators but didn't find one that felt right for me, until one day one just occured to me

I've read it somewhere and it stuck a chord in me. I started to recognize it everywhere and it just slowly dawned on me that it's my name is guess 😅

I made a list of names I've always liked and found I kept coming back to one in particular, so that had to be it.

I read it in a bad sci fi book when I was about 14, and it just stuck in my head until I finally came out. Also I like trees and gin.

My original name has no male counterpart, so I nerded to forge something anew.

I made a large list of names of my language whose letter started with A (same letter as my old name), didn't have a female counterpart and I liked the pronounciation. Then I risked off the names that only very old people used, which were 75% of the list. The remaining list was about eight names. "Abel" was the most common of them.

I noticed afterwards that my parents (if they weren't transphobic cucks) would have liked this name. When I asked them how they picked my name, they said that they wanted it to start with A, be simple to write, short, with no variant spellings, beautiful, with a good meaning and not too common. Also, they're christians.